Planned Migration

GREAT BRITAIN

For years Britain has been growing lopsided. As lingering depression shuttered the mills and shipyards of Scotland and the industrial north, hundreds of thousands of workers and their families drifted into southeast England. New industries sprang up, and a blotchy urban sprawl transformed the home counties surrounding London into Poet John Betjeman's "dear old, bloody old England of telephone poles and tin." Greater London is being choked by its population explosion; its birth rate is six times that of the rest of the country. Traffic is so congested in the city that when a magazine staged a race between a sedan chair and a sports car, the sedan chair won. Last week, after a 2 1/2-year study, the Tories announced a mammoth project to be started within ten years and designed to ease the strangulating conditions in southeast England.

Countermagnets. Described as "the biggest planning project in the free world," the scheme takes in the area stretching from Lyme Regis on the English Channel to The Wash, an inlet on the North Sea. Though this area accounts for only 17% of Britain's land surface, it contains 18 million people, or one-third the island's population. The government proposes building three new cities for up to 250,000 people in this area. In addition, two new developments, each holding 100,000, are planned and 16 existing towns will be expanded to absorb population increases of 30,000 people.

The new towns are to serve as coun--termagnets to London, to draw businesses from the capital, as well as white-collar workers tired of ever-lengthening commuter travel between London and its "dormer" suburbs. The new communities are to be self-contained, with living, working and playing space close together and hence little need for commuting.

Company Wives. Amid general applause for the plan, critics pointed to the 19 "new towns" built earlier throughout Britain, which were supposed to be "an essay in civilization, the means for a happy and gracious way of life." Nearly 550,000 people have already been moved out of urban centers to these garden cities, but many have complained about "loneliness and lack of neighborliness."

While making more room for more people in the southeast, the government hopes also to slow the population drift there--and to prevent the increasing division of the country--by continuing to pressure industries to move north. In the past, this system has not worked too well; many industries have rescinded decisions to move when executives, often prodded by their wives, rebelled rather than leave the social and leisure advantages of London.

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